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On some scenes where the main character is smaller, the main character sprite is shrunk in such a way that it ends up with a higher DPI than the background... this is really ugly to me and makes the character look like they're not in the scene properly.

It's also much better than software scaling (and much more practical than creating individual sprites for every possible scale). If you have Resonance (you DO have Resonance, right?), look at characters in the save slot screenshots.

mondo84: Hmm...I would have thought Steam would directly accept Primordia without putting it through Greenlight, since Steam has every Wadjet game (I think).

On some scenes where the main character is smaller, the main character sprite is shrunk in such a way that it ends up with a higher DPI than the background... this is really ugly to me and makes the character look like they're not in the scene properly.

It's also much better than software scaling (and much more practical than creating individual sprites for every possible scale). If you have Resonance (you DO have Resonance, right?), look at characters in the save slot screenshots.

mondo84: Hmm...I would have thought Steam would directly accept Primordia without putting it through Greenlight, since Steam has every Wadjet game (I think).

Starmaker: Do people still need more proof that Steam sucks?

It does, but unfortunately till GOG gets some of the games I have there I can't really abandon that barge of the damned yet. Hell, if GOG gets Dishonored, I will bow before them loudly announcing "I AM NOT WORTHY! I AM NOT WORTHY! I'M SCUM(mvm)! I SUCK!" :P Dave said on twitter that he got GOG on board so I'm happy about getting Primordia here.

Starmaker: It's also much better than software scaling (and much more practical than creating individual sprites for every possible scale). If you have Resonance (you DO have Resonance, right?), look at characters in the save slot screenshots.

It... is software scaling, it's just software downscaling when most of the art assets have x2 integer scaling already applied, resulting in pixels in the sprites smaller than the 'pixels' in the background.

The way I would propose doing it is rendering the game at the same resolution as the backgrounds so that when you scale the sprites down they can't have pixels that are smaller than they should be.

Starmaker: It's also much better than software scaling (and much more practical than creating individual sprites for every possible scale). If you have Resonance (you DO have Resonance, right?), look at characters in the save slot screenshots.

SirPrimalform: It... is software scaling, it's just software downscaling when most of the art assets have x2 integer scaling already applied, resulting in pixels in the sprites smaller than the 'pixels' in the background.

The way I would propose doing it is rendering the game at the same resolution as the backgrounds so that when you scale the sprites down they can't have pixels that are smaller than they should be.

Yes, that's that I mean. Look at character sprites on those little screenshots - more often that not they look outright creepy. That's what keeping pixel size constant does to pixel art. "Pixels as they should be" are fine in technical screenshots and completely unacceptable in the main game if you want to have perspective.

Characters do not exist in-game as vector files and then get projected at whatever resolution is currently necessary. Pixel art is actual art, it is highly important where exactly you put pixels and what color they are. How are you going to project a sprite at 80% original size if each eye is a single pixel?

SirPrimalform: It... is software scaling, it's just software downscaling when most of the art assets have x2 integer scaling already applied, resulting in pixels in the sprites smaller than the 'pixels' in the background.

The way I would propose doing it is rendering the game at the same resolution as the backgrounds so that when you scale the sprites down they can't have pixels that are smaller than they should be.

Hi, I'm the writer on Primordia. You are going to make the artist's head explode. Your complaint is one that he has voiced for months and months with how the D3D visual mode works in AGS. You lose the "blockiness" of shrunken sprites that older adventure games had. For Vic -- and obviously for you -- that's a big deal. The good thing, though, is that you can fix it by changing to DDraw mode. Then the resolution will be consistent throughout (320x200 or whatever it is), meaning that the smaller sprites will turn into weird impressionistic mosaics, the way they used to. DDraw is incompatible with some newer versions of Windows, but if it works with yours, you can see the game how Victor (and the ancients) intended it to look.

For myself, I found the D3D mode to be somewhat better. The resolution issue only annoys me on rooms where the game is really zoomed out -- such as the train station interior scene that you flagged in your post. That is the worst example; there is one other room that's almost as zoomed out (though not quite as much). Otherwise, the effect is not noticeable in the vast majority of the rooms (to my eye) and in the remaining small minority it's pretty mild. The problem with the chunky DDraw mode is that while it looks better when things are way zoomed out, it looks considerably worse (again, to my eye) when the sprites are shrunken to, say, 85% or 80% or whatever. At that size, D3D doesn't appear to be in a different resolution, and the sprites have no artifacts. (For example, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=0YvWQi_5fsw#t=29s -- the yellow robot is scaled under D3D here, but I don't think the effect is noticeable at all.)

In DDraw, the resolution looks fine, but the sprites have artifacts and look slightly messy / distorted, as was the case in classic adventure games. (Excluding Sierra games, which tended not to scale at all.) If you like the classic look no matter what, it may not bother you, but it always irked me because we use a lot of gradual scaling in rooms, so you rarely see the sprites without artifacts in DDraw.

All said, I think your eyes will adjust to the issue you're having with D3D quite quickly. Or you can play it in DDraw. In either case, though, you really do need to see how great Vic's art looks in game!

SirPrimalform: It... is software scaling, it's just software downscaling when most of the art assets have x2 integer scaling already applied, resulting in pixels in the sprites smaller than the 'pixels' in the background.

The way I would propose doing it is rendering the game at the same resolution as the backgrounds so that when you scale the sprites down they can't have pixels that are smaller than they should be.

Starmaker: Yes, that's that I mean. Look at character sprites on those little screenshots - more often that not they look outright creepy. That's what keeping pixel size constant does to pixel art. "Pixels as they should be" are fine in technical screenshots and completely unacceptable in the main game if you want to have perspective.

Characters do not exist in-game as vector files and then get projected at whatever resolution is currently necessary. Pixel art is actual art, it is highly important where exactly you put pixels and what color they are. How are you going to project a sprite at 80% original size if each eye is a single pixel?

Ideally, I'd say pixel art should only ever be integer scaled (which rules out downscaling). I think really that if you're going to have some long distance shots you should have a different sprite for them. Still, I do find the 'pixel size' mismatch distracting, possibly more distracting than bad nearest neighbour downscaling maintaining the big pixels (I'd find the bad scaling more ugly but less distracting if that makes sense). As it is... it sort of looks (to me) like the character has been photoshopped into the screenshot badly instead of actually being part of the game.

Oh hey, I didn't see your post last night! That's great news about the fact that two different modes can be chosen. If you do use a lot of scaling then I suppose I might end up using the D3D mode anyway. Either way, it's clear already from the trailers and screenshots how breathtakingly beautiful the art is!

lowyhong: So I asked Dave whether we'll be getting GOG keys if we preorder from WJE directly. His reply:

Since GOG has been good with gift codes for those who preorder from WJE, I'd also say the likelihood is high.

Me too, and the response I received was along those lines. No reason not to buy from him then!

And while I'm on the soapbox, I might as well answer a common question. Many of you are asking why we're going through Greenlight, instead of just submitting to Steam directly. We did submit it to them directly, but even though we have seven games on Steam already, they requested we put the game on Greenlight. As to why, I am not privy to Valve's decision-making process, and their policy is that they never give their reasons, so I am just as mystified as you are. In any case, the responses from all of you have been overwhelmingly positive, so I am confident that we'll prove ourselves to Valve (again!) sooner than later. So thank you, all of you.

What's wrong with Valve?

As far as pixel art scaling is concerned, I've been rather impressed with the OpenGLNB output scaling in DOSBox - I can run a 320x200 game scaled up to 1920x1080 (aspect correct with black bars so the image is actually 1440x1080) and not notice any distortion or blurring.

Also the HQ filter can do a pretty good job of giving an alternate high res view of the game. I do wish AGS would support HQ4x though because my monitor and GPU drivers don't know how to handle 960x720 in full screen.

Or at least 2x-nearest neighbor combined with HQ2x would be nice, for a 4x total with 2x of it being HQ :)

I do wonder if 320x200 AGS games are actually meant to be 16:10 - remember back in the CRT days 320x200 was displayed 4:3 with non-square pixels. I'm pretty sure Gemini Rue is meant to be 16:10, but don't know about some of the other titles I've come across.

They want to improve people's perception of Greenlight by forcing [OFFICIAL SEAL OF AWESOME] games through it. Now if you looked at the comments on Greenlight, people are overwhelmingly *angry* at Valve. But there *is* (probably bad) logic behind their actions, it's not HURR DURR all the way.